This weird looking chap is the Waseda Talker-7 robot, and it makes those strange vowel sounds not through a loudspeaker, but a biomechanical simulation of the way we humans speak. To that end, it's got a 19 degrees-of-freedom motorized system that replicates lungs, vocal cords, tongue, lips: basically the whole deal. Most interestingly, Takanishi labs wants to use the tech not for a speaking robot, but to build it into a cellphone for high-compression speech synthesis. And that makes me look forward to the day my cell can blow a raspberry at me. [BotJunkie]